San Diego City Council members held an unusually combative meeting at City Hall Thursday to grill executives at Time Warner Cable and Fox Sports San Diego over a yearlong impasse that has left 129,000 customers north of the San Diego River unable to watch Padres baseball games on television.

The upshot? After months of stalled negotiations, representatives from the two companies will meet in New York City next week to try to find the common ground that was clearly eluding them during Thursday's hearing. It took repeated prompting from city officials to even get the TV executives to sit at the same table at the two-hour hearing, which was recessed twice so the companies could contact other executives elsewhere to schedule next week's meeting.

Meanwhile, Mayor Bob Filner announced that he has set up an official city email account -- gopadres@sandiego.gov -- for angry Padres fans to share their displeasure and their thoughts about switching TV providers from Time Warner Cable to one of the area's other providers.

It's a step Filner and City Attorney Jan Goldsmith urged fans to take. Goldsmith said he suspected many would, and he noted an interesting wrinkle: That that would be bad for the city financially because the city collects a franchise fee from Time Warner to provide cable service within city limits.

There weren't many fans at Thursday's special meeting of the council's Rules and Economic Development Committee, but several, including yours truly, stepped to a lectern to urge the companies to come to terms. (View the archived webcast.) One said there was an implicit agreement between the Padres and city residents in 1998 when voters approved public money to build Petco Park that games would be televised. Another said she was exploring her options to leave Time Warner Cable before the Padres season begins on April 1, as her father in Carlsbad did last year.

Four of the region's five major TV providers have agreed to carry Fox Sports San Diego's televised Padres games this coming season. Fox Sports San Diego executive Henry Ford said that means the market rate has been set and Time Warner Cable should agree to it. Time Warner Cable executive Deane Leavenworth countered that the rate is so much higher than they paid for Padres games two years ago that it doesn't make sense for the company or its consumers. Neither would go into specifics about the offers either has made.

To try to clear the air and bridge the divide, council committee members Sherri Lightner, David Alvarez and Marti Emerald voted 3-0 (with members Kevin Faulconer and Mark Kersey absent) to ask the mayor and city attorney to attempt to get financial documents from Time Warner Cable, using authority it may have in the city's franchise agreement with the company.

That agreement states the mayor is empowered "to examine and transcribe any and all maps and other records kept or maintained" by Time Warner "or under its control concerning the operations, affairs, transactions or property" of Time Warner. Whether that extends to financial records is anyone's guess, at this point, and certainly a matter attorneys could feud over for months, if not years.

So what did the city officials say?

During the meeting, Lightner took issue with what she called the "intransigence" of the TV executives as she peppered them with questions they clearly didn't want to answer, and Alvarez hounded them to set up next week's negotiation. He twice called a recess to give the executives time to reach out to their bosses and also made the point that without the resumption of talks the council hearing would be "a waste of time". Emerald zeroed in on the financial reasons why no deal has been reached and complained about the executives that they "Keep us in the dark and feed us you know what to grow mushrooms."

When he spoke, Filner called it "outrageous" and "an insult to the city" that a deal hasn't been reached to televise Padres games for so many residents and fired off the line of the meeting when he asked the Time Warner Cable executive Leavenworth for his name again, then said, "That's where we're going to put you." It was a reference to the federal penitentiary in Kansas.

For his part, Goldsmith suggested one way to get a deal done is for Fox Sports San Diego to agree to a longer-term deal with Time Warner Cable at different rates than it did with the other four TV providers. It was Goldsmith who kept asking Fox Sports San Diego's Ford to take a seat next to Time Warner Cable's Leavenworth. Ford first declined, saying he was sick and didn't want to get too close, then adding, "If it's symbolic to you, I will."

Thursday's effort by city officials to pressure the two sides into a deal (really the single biggest power they possess) came as a relief to the fans who showed up. The youngest fan among the 40 or so people who attended Thursday's hearing (many of whom were city officials or TV representatives) was 12. The oldest may have been 85.

After the meeting was over, Leavenworth declined to characterize it or to comment at all, and a spokeswoman said Time Warner Cable had said all it would say during the meeting. (One question I was unable to ask Time Warner Cable was about Leavenworth's estimate for the number of households with Time Warner Cable; he gave it as 129,000 when other estimates have put it at 185,000.)

Ford wouldn't be more specific about the date or details about next week's negotiation in a subsequent interview, but that's clearly the next step in the "Padres to the People" movement that fans will be monitoring if they're still on the fence about changing TV providers before the season starts.

If you send an email to gopadres@sandiego.gov, please copy me by email. I'm a Time Warner Cable customer, and I'm also watching to see what happens, if anything, before April 1.